Remember Ben Clayton (26 page)

“In her world, marriage outside the church was a mortal sin. I was in love with your mother. She was a Protestant. You have to understand, my mother wouldn’t have been able to accept it. It would have destroyed her. I had to protect her.”

“You had to protect yourself!”

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

An odd buzzing started up in Maureen’s head. She felt like a machine that had fallen off a track and was now senselessly grinding its gears.

“I don’t even know what questions to start asking. I don’t understand how it was even possible—all these years, to keep it a secret.”

“I had to work at it. I had to think ahead, all the time. It was cruel, I know that. But I had to think of her and what it would do to her if she found out.”

“If she found out that I
existed
? That she had a granddaughter?”

She stood up, walked around the kitchen in agitated circles, not knowing what to say, torn between her angry desire never to set eyes on her father again and the flooding curiosity that only he could satisfy.

“It’s late,” Gil said after a few moments. “And we’ve both had a terrible day. Maybe it would be better if we talked about all of this tomorrow.”

“No, it would
not
be better! Putting off talking about it will just make everything easier for you.”

“There are reasons I did what I did. They may not make sense to you. They may not make sense to me anymore, I don’t know, Maureen, but I was thinking of my mother, of how to protect her so that—”

“And what about
my
mother? She had to know about this, didn’t she?”

“You shouldn’t blame her for anything. She wanted to tell you. We had terrible arguments about it.”

“You made her lie to me.”

“Yes.”

In one brisk stride Gil’s daughter walked up to him and struck him across the face. He had never been slapped by a woman, had only seen it in the moving pictures, and the theatricality of the gesture astonished him more than the blow itself. It was so out of keeping with his daughter’s temperament, so out of keeping with everything.

She was gone now, down the hallway and into her room. He had nowhere to go so he stayed where he was at the kitchen table, gripping its enamel sides in his powerful sculptor’s hands.

TWENTY-THREE

L
amar Clayton sat in a corner booth of the Manhattan Cafe on First Street, eating soup and crackers while he read the
Abilene Daily Reporter
. The news was about the treaty and the Lansing business and the Reds threatening to take over Eastern Europe, all the confusion left over from the war that nobody was ever going to settle. Especially not Wilson, who Clayton hadn’t ever thought was worth a damn. He remembered the craziness when the war ended, people bursting out in tears, the paper full of blather about everything the boys had accomplished. It was like people really believed the world had been put back together and everything was going to make perfect sense from now on. It had made him sick, all those furniture stores and tire dealers taking out ads with poems welcoming the soldiers home, all those illustrations of women in flowing gowns holding torches and olive branches hailing the victors and blessing the noble fallen. He hated that goddam word “fallen.” Like they’d just slipped to the ground instead of being blown into pieces by shells or getting their guts ripped out by machine-gun bullets. There had been one illustration that had really torn at him, an advertisement for Farmers and Merchants Bank showing a boy in uniform running through the front door of his parents’ house, his arms extended, his mother sitting in a chair, surprised in her knitting, gasping in joy, the boy’s father standing behind his wife, about to drop his newspaper in astonishment. The wondrous reunion, all the tests passed and all the trials behind them. You could look at that picture and imagine the boy sleeping in his old room for a day and a night, wrung out, bursting with stories yet to be told, woken at last by the smell of his mother’s cooking, the morning sun streaming through the window.

It would not have been like that if Ben had come home, he knew. There had been no mother for him to come back to, just George’s Mary. He had left for Europe without a word to Lamar and he would have come back agitated and resentful and scarred, with new grievances to take up with his father. But there might have been a moment at least, a welcome-home moment not too far off from that illustration in the paper. Lamar had imagined it often enough while Ben had been overseas. A simple tight-gripped handshake at the train station, him saying “Welcome home, son,” and Ben looking off to the side so his father wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes. Maybe they would have sat out on the porch after dinner, neither of them saying much, Lamar making a point not to quiz him about what he’d seen over there, Peggy asleep in Ben’s lap, George’s Mary opening the door with her hip and bringing out two big dishes of cobbler.

Lamar finished the last of his watery soup and looked around the diner. It was two o’clock and most of the customers had left by now. The waitress had a pan of biscuits just out of the oven and was about to put them in a warming tray. It seemed odd they would be making a new batch of biscuits after lunch was over but it was no business of his.

“Bring me a few of those before they get cold,” Lamar called out to her.

She put a couple of the biscuits on a plate and walked over to him and plunked it down. She was about sixteen, skinny and homely and no life to her at all. There was a waitress over at the Ideal he liked better, but it was closed on Tuesday and it didn’t matter anyway. He didn’t come to Abilene often enough for the waitresses to remember him. He had a few friends here in the cattle business but he saw them mostly at stock shows and the like. He didn’t generally visit people just to pass the time. He wouldn’t have been in Abilene at all today if George’s Mary hadn’t taken a dislike to the dentist in Albany and insisted on being driven all the way to the city just to get a few teeth out. Lamar would have left the business of driving her to Ernest or Nax but there was a fence down in one of the far pastures and he was feeling his age this week. There was a stabbing pain in his knee that came and went and a creak in his hipbone. He figured he’d rather be in a motorcar than on board a horse, but it aggravated him that he had to drive so damn far because George’s Mary was squeamish about dentists.

He ate the two biscuits while they were still hot and then paid his bill and walked next door to a dry goods store and bought six new shirts, for seventy-nine cents apiece. They were all the same, khaki work shirts with flaps on the front pockets. He disliked buying new clothes and didn’t care for the feel of them until George’s Mary had washed them six or eight times, but the rest of his shirts were worn out and needed to be replaced. He looked around the store to kill time, but there wasn’t anything else he needed. He thought about buying something for George’s Mary, just to cheer her up after getting her teeth out, but he didn’t know anything about women’s clothes or what size she was.

A half hour later he picked her up in front of an office building on Pine Street. She was standing there looking miserable with her mouth swollen and full of bloody cotton swabs. She gave Lamar a cross look and held up four fingers when Lamar asked her how many teeth the dentist had taken out. He got irritated with himself for not thinking of having that waitress pack up some soup for her, since she wasn’t going to be eating anything that needed much chewing for a while.

“Don’t you worry about cooking dinner tonight,” he told her, doing his best to feel generous. “We can open a can or two of chili.”

“I already cooked your dinner ahead,” she mumbled. “Think I don’t have the sense to do that?”

“I was just trying to make things easier on you,” he said. “No reason to bark at me about it.”

She took one of the blood-soaked cotton wads out her mouth, inspected it for a moment, and threw it out of the car before replacing it with a fresh one from a paper bag she had on her lap.

“Hurts like hell,” she said.

“He didn’t give you any aspirin or anything?”

“He did, but it still hurts like hell. Is my mouth all caved in now?”

“I can’t tell,” he said. “It looks all swole up to me.”

“I hate losing my teeth,” she said. She was silent and glum for another ten miles, until the left front tire went flat and Lamar, cursing, pulled over to the side of the empty road. When he looked over at George’s Mary, she was crying.

“Take some more aspirin if it hurts that bad,” he said.

“It ain’t that it hurts.” She could still barely open her mouth when she talked and her words were slurry and hard to catch. “Maybe I don’t like it that I’m an old ugly toothless woman.”

“Well, I can’t fix that and fix this tire both,” Lamar said. He got out of the car to get out the tire irons and the air pump. Fortunately there was a spare tube, so he didn’t have to patch the damn thing, but it was hard work all the same, bad on his knee to bend down and harder still on his scarred and stiff hands as he pried the tire off the rim. As he worked, George’s Mary got out of the car and walked off a little ways to be by herself, which suited him fine as well. The only good thing he could say about anything was that it was a warm enough day, over fifty degrees. He’d hardly needed his coat when they started out and now as he squeezed the new tube back into the tire there was sweat in his eyes just like it was August instead of February.

He pumped up the tire and put the old tube and the tire irons back into the toolbox, and then he was ready to go. But George’s Mary was still off by herself, sitting on a rock and looking out over the open land that stretched off from the road. He started to yell at her to come and get back in the car, but he decided he’d be more gentlemanly about it. He walked over to join her. She was watching an armadillo root around in a shallow little draw about twenty feet away. The creature hadn’t caught their scent and was too deaf even to hear Lamar’s boots shuffling through the rock chips that covered the ground.

“You get back in the car and we’ll get you home,” he told her.

She didn’t say anything in reply and didn’t move. Lamar decided what the hell and sat down on the rock bench next to her. She threw another bloody cotton swab down onto the ground and said she missed Ben.

“I know it,” he said.

“I’m a fifty-eight-year-old woman with half my teeth gone.”

“They’d still be gone whether Ben was alive or dead. Wouldn’t make no difference.”

“I know, but I cared about that boy and he cared about me and now I got nothing.”

“Ain’t you a little late bringing all this up?”

“Didn’t know I’m supposed to feel things like I’m on a train schedule.”

She reached down and picked up the bloody cotton she had thrown on the ground and put it into her pocket instead. She turned to him and asked him if he thought about his folks much.

“Not much, I guess. I’m old and that was a hell of a long time ago.”

“I think about mine.”

She didn’t seem to have any more to say about the matter, so he just sat there with her without either of them saying anything. It wasn’t a bad place to sit on a mild February day, and he was tired from changing the tire anyway. He figured he would just give her whatever time she needed to get out of this mood she was in.

She didn’t pity herself for the most part, but every once in a while the idea that she’d missed out on something got ahold of her and wouldn’t let go for a few days. The first time he ever saw her she’d been beat all to hell and looked a lot worse than she did now. It had taken days for the swelling to go down enough to where you could see the natural shape of her head and the look of her face. He had come across her one morning when he was walking through the Flat looking for someplace to eat breakfast. She was sitting out in the dirt in front of Conrad’s store groaning and staring off into space and holding her split lip together. None of her bones were broken, but they had worked her over pretty good in all sorts of ways. Lamar talked to the sheriff in the Flat and the duty officer at Fort Griffin and even a man on the vigilance committee but he couldn’t get anybody interested. The teamsters that had done it had left in the night and had a good start, and anyway they were carrying freight for the biggest merchants in town. Even the other whores didn’t care about her. She was new in town to begin with and she wasn’t friendly. She’d been rude and pouty with the customers and it was no wonder somebody finally treated her like that.

Lamar was in his late thirties then, getting a good start for himself finally after too many years of wandering and drinking and not doing much worth a damn. Quanah Parker, the Quahada chief whose own mother had been a white captive, was the big man on the Comanche and Kiowa reservation in those days, and Lamar had talked him into leasing him some land for six cents an acre, a better price than even Burk Burnett had got. He made enough money on that Comanche land grazing longhorns that he was able to buy a few thousand acres in Shackelford County and gave up the lease years before the government would have taken it away anyway for nothing. There was a homesteader’s abandoned blockhouse on the land and he built his house around that piece by piece, and brought in Durhams and Herefords and worked on getting them right. He kept a few longhorns for nostalgic reasons but otherwise the hell with them. You could lose money thinking the years hadn’t passed and the country was still wild.

When he came across George’s Mary, he was living in his house on the ranch but he was as likely as not to be out in the line camps with the hands. He asked her if she could cook and keep house and she said she could do both. He decided that even if she was lying she would do a better job than he did, and it made sense to him to have somebody in the house when he wasn’t around. So after she’d healed up a little he took her back. He wasn’t sure why he trusted her, he just did. She was young and in those days was not bad-looking, but he never had anything to do with her that way, and it didn’t matter to him if people thought he did. She turned out to be a better cook than he thought, though she was starchy and opinionated and acted like she was the one who’d done him a favor by coming to live with him and not the other way around. She was a little resentful at first when Sarey came into the picture, but she softened up soon enough, and when Ben was born he brought the feelings out of her that she’d been hiding away all those years. It was hard to look at her now, because the grief at losing Ben had never really left her face. She was old in a way that wasn’t just old, but broken and angry and even kind of righteous, as if she meant for you to look at her and see that there was no such thing as being happy after all and you were a fool to have ever believed otherwise.

Lamar thought he probably gave the same impression to people. He and George’s Mary were more alike than they were different. There weren’t too many people who could say they’d lost their family to Indians, even back in those days. And they’d both been coaxed back into the world before having it close down on them again.

“I guess I’m about through sitting on this rock,” she said at last in her tight-jawed mumble.

When Lamar stood up, he had to take a minute, because there were jabbing pains in his knee from kneeling in the dirt to change the tire and he was not all that sure it would even support him. But he worked it out enough to hobble back to the car.

“You’re getting too decrepit to sit a horse,” she said, goading him again after he’d been nothing but kind to her the whole day.

“To hell with you,” he said, but he was glad she was getting some of her bite back.

When they got home she went straight to her bed and he opened the mail. One of the letters was from Gil Gilheaney. There was a check inside reimbursing Lamar for the money he had paid out. The letter said “unforeseen circumstances” had made it impossible for Gilheaney to continue the project after all. He wished Lamar well and thanked him for his patience and said he would be happy to recommend another sculptor if one was desired.

Clayton picked up a chair and threw it against the wall. George’s Mary came out of her room and wondered why he didn’t have the decency to give her even a moment of peace.

“Because the sonofabitch went back on his word is why!” Clayton said, thrusting the letter at her.

“Just tell me what it says. My teeth hurt too bad to read.”